8812 books match the query 'Political Science' and 211 start with n

cover of Nations and Nationalism: A Reader

Nations and Nationalism

A Reader

Spencer, Philip

Rutgers University Press, 2005

Nationalism has become a topic of wide-ranging significance and heated debate over recent years, with a huge expansion in the amount of literature available. Bringing together the best and most representative of these writings, Nations and Nationalism is an essential reader for students of political theory and related fields.  

Assembled by two influential scholars, the volume includes the core, basic texts required for any course on nationalism, along with a selection of less well-known contributions that illuminates the debates. Articles and chapters cover the origins, different types, and concepts of nationalism; its relationship with race, gender, and ethnicity; the impact of globalization, post-communism, and migration; and debates about citizenship and self-determination. Classic writers such as Ernest Gellner, Anthony Smith, Benedict Anderson, and John Breuilly are represented along with younger scholars who have played a critical role in reshaping contemporary attitudes toward the topic. 

Selected writings by historians, sociologists, and anthropologists supplement contributions from political scientists so that students will be able to compare theories and debates across a range of disciplines and time periods. Taken together, the chapters provide a balanced and vivid overview of how nationalism has exploded as a topic of inquiry over the last two decades and how it has interacted with other political and social forces.

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cover of Native Foods: Agriculture, Indigeneity, and Settler Colonialism in American History

Native Foods

Agriculture, Indigeneity, and Settler Colonialism in American History

Michael D. Wise

University of Arkansas Press, 2023

In Native Foods: Agriculture, Indigeneity, and Settler Colonialism in American History, Michael D. Wise confronts four common myths about Indigenous food history: that most Native communities did not practice agriculture; that Native people were primarily hunters; that Native people were usually hungry; and that Native people never developed taste or cuisine. Wise argues that colonial expectations of food and agriculture have long structured ways of seeing (and of not seeing) Native land and labor.

Combining original historical research with interdisciplinary perspectives and informed by the work of Indigenous food sovereignty advocates and activists, this study sheds new light on the historical roles of Native American cuisine in American history and the significance of ongoing colonial processes in present-day discussions about the place of Native foods and Native history in our evolving worlds of taste, justice, and politics.
 
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cover of Native Land Talk: Indigenous and Arrivant Rights Theories

Native Land Talk

Indigenous and Arrivant Rights Theories

Yael Ben-zvi

Dartmouth College Press, 2018

Histories of rights have too often marginalized Native Americans and African Americans. Addressing this lacuna, Native Land Talk expands our understanding of freedom by examining rights theories that Indigenous and African-descended peoples articulated in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As settlers began to distrust the entitlements that the English used to justify their rule, the colonized and the enslaved formulated coherent logics of freedom and belonging. By anchoring rights in nativity, they countered settlers’ attempts to dispossess and disenfranchise them. Drawing on a plethora of texts, including petitions, letters, newspapers, and official records, Yael Ben-zvi analyzes nativity’s unsettling potentials and its discursive and geopolitical implications. She shows how rights were constructed in relation to American, African, and English spaces, and explains the obstacles to historic solidarity between Native American and African American struggles.
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cover of Native Sons: West African Veterans and France in the Twentieth Century

Native Sons

West African Veterans and France in the Twentieth Century

Gregory Mann

Duke University Press, 2006

For much of the twentieth century, France recruited colonial subjects from sub-Saharan Africa to serve in its military, sending West African soldiers to fight its battles in Europe, Southeast Asia, and North Africa. In this exemplary contribution to the “new imperial history,” Gregory Mann argues that this shared military experience between France and Africa was fundamental not only to their colonial relationship but also to the reconfiguration of that relationship in the postcolonial era. Mann explains that in the early twenty-first century, among Africans in France and Africa, and particularly in Mali—where Mann conducted his research—the belief that France has not adequately recognized and compensated the African veterans of its wars is widely held and frequently invoked. It continues to animate the political relationship between France and Africa, especially debates about African immigration to France.

Focusing on the period between World War I and 1968, Mann draws on archival research and extensive interviews with surviving Malian veterans of French wars to explore the experiences of the African soldiers. He describes the effects their long absences and infrequent homecomings had on these men and their communities, he considers the veterans’ status within contemporary Malian society, and he examines their efforts to claim recognition and pensions from France. Mann contends that Mali is as much a postslavery society as it is a postcolonial one, and that specific ideas about reciprocity, mutual obligation, and uneven exchange that had developed during the era of slavery remain influential today, informing Malians’ conviction that France owes them a “blood debt” for the military service of African soldiers in French wars.

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cover of Native Space: Geographic Strategies to Unsettle Settler Colonialism

Native Space

Geographic Strategies to Unsettle Settler Colonialism

Natchee Blu Barnd

Oregon State University Press, 2017

Native Space explores how indigenous communities and individuals sustain and create geographies through place-naming, everyday cultural practices, and artistic activism, within the boundaries of the settler colonial nation of the United States. Diverging from scholarship that tends to treat indigenous geography as an analytical concept, Natchee Blu Barnd instead draws attention to the subtle manifestations of everyday cultural practices—the concrete and often mundane activities involved in the creation of indigenous space.
 
What are the limits and potentials of indigenous acts of spatial production? Native Space argues that control over the notion of “Indianness” still sits at the center of how space is produced in a neocolonial nation, and shows how non-indigenous communities uniquely deploy Native   identities in the direct construction of colonial geographies. In short, “the Indian” serves to create White space in concrete ways.  Yet, Native geographies effectively reclaim indigenous identities, assert ongoing relations to the land, and refuse the claims of settler colonialism. 
 
Barnd creatively and persuasively uses original cartographic research and demographic data, a series of interrelated stories set in the Midwestern Plains states of Kansas and Oklahoma, an examination of visual art by contemporary indigenous artists, and discussions of several forms of indigenous activism to support his argument. With its highly original, interdisciplinary approach, Native Space makes a significant contribution to the literature in cultural and critical geography, comparative ethnic studies, indigenous studies, cultural studies, American Studies, and related fields.
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cover of Natives against Nativism: Antiracism and Indigenous Critique in Postcolonial France

Natives against Nativism

Antiracism and Indigenous Critique in Postcolonial France

Olivia C. Harrison

University of Minnesota Press, 2023

Examining the intersection of Palestine solidarity movements and antiracist activism in France from the 1970s to the present

 

For the pasty fifty years, the Palestinian question has served as a rallying cry in the struggle for migrant rights in postcolonial France, from the immigrant labor associations of the 1970s and Beur movements of the 1980s to the militant decolonial groups of the 2000s. In Natives against Nativism, Olivia C. Harrison explores the intersection of anticolonial solidarity and antiracist activism from the 1970s to the present.

Natives against Nativism analyzes a wide range of texts—novels, memoirs, plays, films, and militant archives—that mobilize the twin figures of the Palestinian and the American Indian in a crossed critique of Eurocolonial modernity. Harrison argues that anticolonial solidarity with Palestinians and Indigenous Americans has been instrumental in developing a sophisticated critique of racism across imperial formations—in this case, France, the United States, and Israel.

Serving as the first relational study of antiracism in France, Natives against Nativism observes how claims to indigeneity have been deployed in multiple directions, both in the ongoing struggle for migrant rights and racial justice, and in white nativist claims in France today.

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cover of Natural Resource Development and Human Rights in Latin America: State and non-state actors in the promotion of and opposition to extractivism

Natural Resource Development and Human Rights in Latin America

State and non-state actors in the promotion of and opposition to extractivism

Edited by Malayna Raftopoulos and Radoslaw Poweska

University of London Press, 2017

Contemporary development debates in Latin America are marked by the pursuit of economic growth, technological improvement and poverty reduction, and are overshadowed by growing concerns about the preservation of the environment and human rights. This collection’s multidisciplinary perspective links local, national, regional and transnational levels of inquiry into the interaction of state and non-state actors involved in promoting or opposing natural resource development. Taking this approach allows the book to contemplate the complex panorama of competing visions, concepts and interests grounded in the mutual influences and interdependencies which shape the contemporary arena of social-environmental conflicts in the region.
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cover of Natural Resources and the New Frontier: Constructing Modern China's Borderlands

Natural Resources and the New Frontier

Constructing Modern China's Borderlands

Judd C. Kinzley

University of Chicago Press, 2018

China’s westernmost province of Xinjiang has experienced escalating cycles of violence, interethnic strife, and state repression since the 1990s. In their search for the roots of these growing tensions, scholars have tended to focus on ethnic clashes and political disputes. In Natural Resources and the New Frontier, historian Judd C. Kinzley takes a different approach—one that works from the ground up to explore the infrastructural and material foundation of state power in the region.
 
As Kinzley argues, Xinjiang’s role in producing various natural resources for regional powers has been an important but largely overlooked factor in fueling unrest. He carefully traces the buildup to this unstable situation over the course of the twentieth century by focusing on the shifting priorities of Chinese, Soviet, and provincial officials regarding the production of various resources, including gold, furs, and oil among others. Through his archival work, Kinzley offers a new way of viewing Xinjiang that will shape the conversation about this important region and offer a model for understanding the development of other frontier zones in China as well as across the global south.

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cover of Natural Right and History

Natural Right and History

Leo Strauss

University of Chicago Press, 1965

In this classic work, Leo Strauss examines the problem of natural right and argues that there is a firm foundation in reality for the distinction between right and wrong in ethics and politics. On the centenary of Strauss's birth, and the fiftieth anniversary of the Walgreen Lectures which spawned the work, Natural Right and History remains as controversial and essential as ever.

"Strauss . . . makes a significant contribution towards an understanding of the intellectual crisis in which we find ourselves . . . [and] brings to his task an admirable scholarship and a brilliant, incisive mind."—John H. Hallowell, American Political Science Review

Leo Strauss (1899-1973) was the Robert Maynard Hutchins Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus in Political Science at the University of Chicago.
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cover of Natural Visions: The Power of Images in American Environmental Reform

Natural Visions

The Power of Images in American Environmental Reform

Finis Dunaway

University of Chicago Press, 2005

Walden Pond. The Grand Canyon.Yosemite National Park. Throughout the twentieth century, photographers and filmmakers created unforgettable images of these and other American natural treasures. Many of these images, including the work of Ansel Adams, continue to occupy a prominent place in the American imagination. Making these representations, though, was more than a purely aesthetic project. In fact, portraying majestic scenes and threatened places galvanized concern for the environment and its protection. Natural Visions documents through images the history of environmental reform from the Progressive era to the first Earth Day celebration in 1970, showing the crucial role the camera played in the development of the conservation movement.

In Natural Visions, Finis Dunaway tells the story of how visual imagery—such as wilderness photographs, New Deal documentary films, and Sierra Club coffee-table books—shaped modern perceptions of the natural world. By examining the relationship between the camera and environmental politics through detailed studies of key artists and activists, Dunaway captures the emotional and spiritual meaning that became associated with the American landscape. Throughout the book, he reveals how photographers and filmmakers adapted longstanding traditions in American culture—the Puritan jeremiad, the romantic sublime, and the frontier myth—to literally picture nature as a place of grace for the individual and the nation.

Beautifully illustrated with photographs by Ansel Adams, Eliot Porter, and a host of other artists, Natural Visions will appeal to a wide range of readers interested in American cultural history, the visual arts, and environmentalism.
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cover of Nature Fantasies: Decolonization and Biopolitics in Latin America

Nature Fantasies

Decolonization and Biopolitics in Latin America

Gabriel Horowitz

Bucknell University Press, 2024

In this original study, Gabriel Horowitz examines the work of select nineteenth- and twentieth-century Latin American writers through the lens of contemporary theoretical debates about nature, postcoloniality, and national identity. In the work of José Martí, Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, Jorge Luis Borges, Augusto Roa Bastos, Cesar Aira, and others, he traces historical constructions of nature in regional intellectual traditions and texts as they inform political culture on the broader global stage. By investigating national literary discourses from Cuba, Argentina, and Paraguay, he identifies a common narrative thread that imagines the utopian wilderness of the New World as a symbolic site of independence from Spain. In these texts, Horowitz argues, an expressed desire to return to the nation’s foundational nature contributed to a movement away from political and social engagement and toward a “biopolitical state,” in which nature, traditionally seen as pre-political, conversely becomes its center.

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cover of Nature Inc.: Environmental Conservation in the Neoliberal Age

Nature Inc.

Environmental Conservation in the Neoliberal Age

Edited by Bram Büscher, Wolfram Dressler, and Robert Fletcher

University of Arizona Press, 2014

Can “market forces” solve the world’s environmental problems? The stakes are undeniably high. With wildlife populations and biodiversity riches threatened across the globe, it is obvious that new and innovative methods of addressing the crisis are vital to the future of the planet. But is “the market” the answer?

As public funding for conservation efforts grows ever scarcer and the private sector is brimming with ideas about how its role—along with its profits— can grow, market forces have found their way into environmental management to a degree unimaginable only a few years ago. Ecotourism, payment for environmental services (PES), and new conservation finance instruments such as species banking, carbon trading, and biodiversity derivatives are only some of the market mechanisms that have sprung into being. This is “Nature™ Inc.”: a fast-growing frontier of networks, activities, knowledge, and regulations that are rapidly changing the relations between people and nature on both global and local scales.

Nature™ Inc. brings together cutting-edge research by respected scholars from around the world to analyze how “neoliberal conservation” is reshaping human–nature relations that have been fashioned over two centuries of capitalist development. Contributors synthesize and add to a growing body of academic literature that cuts across the disciplinary boundaries of geography, sociology, anthropology, political science, and development studies to critically interrogate the increasing emphasis on neoliberal market-based mechanisms in environmental conservation. They all grapple with one overriding question: can capitalist market mechanisms resolve the environmental problems they have helped create?
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cover of Nature of Hope: Grassroots Organizing, Environmental Justice, and Political Change

Nature of Hope

Grassroots Organizing, Environmental Justice, and Political Change

Char Miller

University Press of Colorado, 2018

The Nature of Hope focuses on the dynamics of environmental activism at the local level, examining the environmental and political cultures that emerge in the context of conflict. The book considers how ordinary people have coalesced to demand environmental justice and highlights the powerful role of intersectionality in shaping the on-the-ground dynamics of popular protest and social change.
 
Through lively and accessible storytelling, The Nature of Hope reveals unsung and unstinting efforts to protect the physical environment and human health in the face of continuing economic growth and development and the failure of state and federal governments to deal adequately with the resulting degradation of air, water, and soils. In an age of environmental crisis, apathy, and deep-seated cynicism, these efforts suggest the dynamic power of a “politics of hope” to offer compelling models of resistance, regeneration, and resilience. The contributors frame their chapters around the drive for greater democracy and improved human and ecological health and demonstrate that local activism is essential to the preservation of democracy and the protection of the environment. The book also brings to light new styles of leadership and new structures for activist organizations, complicating assumptions about the environmental movement in the United States that have focused on particular leaders, agencies, thematic orientations, and human perceptions of nature.
 
The critical implications that emerge from these stories about ecological activism are crucial to understanding the essential role that protecting the environment plays in sustaining the health of civil society. The Nature of Hope will be crucial reading for scholars interested in environmentalism and the mechanics of social movements and will engage historians, geographers, political scientists, grassroots activists, humanists, and social scientists alike.
 
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cover of Natures of Colonial Change: Environmental Relations in the Making of the Transkei

Natures of Colonial Change

Environmental Relations in the Making of the Transkei

Jacob A. Tropp

Ohio University Press, 2006

In this groundbreaking study, Jacob A. Tropp explores the interconnections between negotiations over the environment and an emerging colonial relationship in a particular South African context—the Transkei—subsequently the largest of the notorious “homelands” under apartheid.

In the late nineteenth century, South Africa’s Cape Colony completed its incorporation of the area beyond the Kei River, known as the Transkei, and began transforming the region into a labor reserve. It simultaneously restructured popular access to local forests, reserving those resources for the benefit of the white settler economy. This placed new constraints on local Africans in accessing resources for agriculture, livestock management, hunting, building materials, fuel, medicine, and ritual practices.

Drawing from a diverse array of oral and written sources, Tropp reveals how bargaining over resources—between and among colonial officials, chiefs and headmen, and local African men and women—was interwoven with major changes in local political authority, gendered economic relations, and cultural practices as well as with intense struggles over the very meaning and scope of colonial rule itself.

Natures of Colonial Change sheds new light on the colonial era in the Transkei by looking at significant yet neglected dimensions of this history: how both “colonizing” and “colonized” groups negotiated environmental access and how such negotiations helped shape the broader making and meaning of life in the new colonial order.

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cover of Navigating Climate Change Policy: The Opportunities of Federalism

Navigating Climate Change Policy

The Opportunities of Federalism

Edella C. Schlager

University of Arizona Press, 2011

This timely volume challenges the notion that because climate change is inherently a global problem, only coordinated actions on a global scale can lead to a solution. It considers the perspective that since climate change itself has both global and local causes and implications, the most effective policies for adapting to and mitigating climate change must involve governments and communities at many different levels.

Federalism—the system of government in which power is divided among a national government and state and regional governments—is well-suited to address the challenges of climate change because it permits distinctive policy responses at a variety of scales. The chapters in this book explore questions such as what are appropriate relationships between states, tribes, and the federal government as each actively pursues climate-change policies? How much leeway should states have in designing and implementing climate-change policies, and how extensively should the federal government exercise its preemption powers to constrain state activity? What climate-change strategies are states best suited to pursue, and what role, if any, will regional state-based collaborations and associations play? This book examines these questions from a variety of perspectives, blending legal and policy analyses to provide thought-provoking coverage of how governments in a federal system cooperate, coordinate, and accommodate one another to address this global problem.

Navigating Climate Change Policy is an essential resource for policymakers and judges at all levels of government who deal with questions of climate governance. It will also serve as an important addition to the curriculum on climate change and environmental policy in graduate and undergraduate courses and will be of interest to anyone concerned with how the government addresses environmental issues.
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cover of Navigating Gendered Terrain: Stereotypes and Strategy in Political Campaigns

Navigating Gendered Terrain

Stereotypes and Strategy in Political Campaigns

Kelly Dittmar

Temple University Press, 2014

From the presidential level down, men and women who run for political office confront different electoral realities. In her probing study, Navigating Gendered Terrain, Kelly Dittmar investigates how gender influences the campaign strategy and behavior of candidates today. Concurrently, she shows how candidates' strategic and tactical decisions can influence the gendered nature of campaign institutions.
 
Navigating Gendered Terrain addresses how gender is used to shape how campaigns are waged by influencing insider perceptions of and decisions about effective campaign messages, images, and tactics within party and political contexts. Dittmar uses survey information and interviews with candidates, political consultants, and other campaign professionals to reveal how gender-informed advertising, websites, and overall presentation to voters respond to stereotypes and perceptions of female and male candidates.
 
She closes her book by offering a feminist interpretation of women as candidates and explaining how the unintended outcomes of political campaigns reinforce prevailing ideas about gender and candidacy.
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cover of Navigating Normative Orders: Interdisciplinary Perspectives

Navigating Normative Orders

Interdisciplinary Perspectives

Edited by Matthias C. Kettemann

Campus Verlag, 2020

Normative orders emerge and pollinate everywhere. Whether it be with Kant or among conservatives, posts on the internet, in environmental discourses, or in our raising of our children: Norms populate and spread. This book explains how norms are created, why they are adopted, how they can be legitimated, and how they are contested and disappear. Combining twelve contributions from a diverse range of disciplines, the book unites, for the first time, younger scholars from the Research Centre “Normative Orders” at the University of Frankfurt. Even as certainties are questioned, norms are shown to play a central and vital role in regulating our behavior and understandings. Together, these norms form normative orders, with and through which political authority and the distribution of rights and goods are legitimized, in criminal law, educational systems, the territorial state, the discourse on progress, and in the Anthropocene. As Navigating Normative Orders shows, these norms control our personal and political lives in ways we may not even realize.
 
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cover of Navigating the African Diaspora: The Anthropology of Invisibility

Navigating the African Diaspora

The Anthropology of Invisibility

Donald Martin Carter

University of Minnesota Press, 2010

Investigating how the fraught political economy of migration impacts people around the world, Donald Martin Carter raises important issues about contemporary African diasporic movements. Developing the notion of the anthropology of invisibility, he explores the trope of navigation in social theory intent on understanding the lived experiences of transnational migrants.
 
Carter examines invisibility in its various forms, from social rejection and residential segregation to war memorials and the inability of some groups to represent themselves through popular culture, scholarship, or art. The pervasiveness of invisibility is not limited to symbolic actions, Carter shows, but may have dramatic and at times catastrophic consequences for people subjected to its force. The geographic span of his analysis is global, encompassing Senegalese Muslims in Italy and the United States and concluding with practical questions about the future of European societies. Carter also considers both contemporary and historical constellations of displacement, from Darfurian refugees to French West African colonial soldiers.
 
Whether focusing on historical photographs, television, print media, and graffiti scrawled across urban walls or identifying the critique of colonialism implicit in African films and literature, Carter reveals a protean and peopled world in motion.
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cover of Naïve Readings: Reveilles Political and Philosophic

Naïve Readings

Reveilles Political and Philosophic

Ralph Lerner

University of Chicago Press, 2016

One sure fact of humanity is that we all cherish our opinions and will often strongly resist efforts by others to change them. Philosophers and politicians have long understood this, and whenever they have sought to get us to think differently they have often resorted to forms of camouflage that slip their unsettling thoughts into our psyche without raising alarm. In this fascinating examination of a range of writers and thinkers, Ralph Lerner offers a new method of reading that detects this camouflage and offers a way toward deeper understandings of some of history’s most important—and most concealed—messages.
           
Lerner analyzes an astonishing diversity of writers, including Francis Bacon, Benjamin Franklin, Edward Gibbon, Judah Halevi, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Moses Maimonides, and Alexis de Tocqueville. He shows that by reading their words slowly and naïvely, with wide-open eyes and special attention for moments of writing that become self-conscious, impassioned, or idiosyncratic, we can begin to see a pattern that illuminates a thinker’s intent, new messages purposively executed through indirect means. Through these experimental readings, Lerner shows, we can see a deep commonality across writers from disparate times and situations, one that finds them artfully challenging others to reject passivity and fatalism and start thinking afresh.    
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cover of Nearly Neighbors: Jane Addams, Johnny Powers, and the Progressive Political Imagination

Nearly Neighbors

Jane Addams, Johnny Powers, and the Progressive Political Imagination

Terrence J. McDonald

University of Chicago Press, 2026

An engaging look at the encounter between Jane Addams, Hull House settlement co-founder and Progressive reformer, and Alderman Johnny Powers.
 
Jane Addams was full of courage and goodwill when she opened Hull House in Chicago’s Nineteenth Ward in 1889. However, she failed to understand that her immigrant neighbors had been well-organized around mostly Catholic churches and schools for decades before her arrival. Her ultimate political rival, Johnny Powers, grew up in this culture but was no ethnic hero or deep political thinker. Nearly Neighbors is the first book to provide a contextualized history of their encounter, embedding it in the social and political culture and structures of Chicago and the Nineteenth Ward in the 1890s.

Terrence J. McDonald provides a crucial analysis of two pivotal figures in Chicago’s political history, in part by providing the first detailed assessment of Powers’s life and practices, but also by demonstrating Addams’s misconception of him and her neighbors—and why it matters for understanding her Progressive work overall. In both her political work and writings, Addams saw her ethnic neighbors as bundles of economic need, rather than bearers of ethnic culture. At the same time, she was recruited by elite allies into causes that appeared to be opposed by her neighbors. These views and practices permitted Powers to win in their climactic political battle in 1898 simply by claiming to be the neighborhood defender against Addams and her “downtown” allies. Nearly Neighbors offers a new way of understanding Addams and the complicated legacy of her famous political work and writings. 
 
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cover of Necro Citizenship: Death, Eroticism, and the Public Sphere in the Nineteenth-Century United States

Necro Citizenship

Death, Eroticism, and the Public Sphere in the Nineteenth-Century United States

Russ Castronovo

Duke University Press, 2001

In Necro Citizenship Russ Castronovo argues that the meaning of citizenship in the United States during the nineteenth century was bound to—and even dependent on—death. Deploying an impressive range of literary and cultural texts, Castronovo interrogates an American public sphere that fetishized death as a crucial point of political identification. This morbid politics idealized disembodiment over embodiment, spiritual conditions over material ones, amnesia over history, and passivity over engagement.

Moving from medical engravings, séances, and clairvoyant communication to Supreme Court decisions, popular literature, and physiological tracts, Necro Citizenship explores how rituals of inclusion and belonging have generated alienation and dispossession. Castronovo contends that citizenship does violence to bodies, especially those of blacks, women, and workers. “Necro ideology,” he argues, supplied citizens with the means to think about slavery, economic powerlessness, or social injustice as eternal questions, beyond the scope of politics or critique. By obsessing on sleepwalkers, drowned women, and other corpses, necro ideology fostered a collective demand for an abstract even antidemocratic sense of freedom. Examining issues involving the occult, white sexuality, ghosts, and suicide in conjunction with readings of Harriet Jacobs, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Frederick Douglass, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Frances Harper, Necro Citizenship successfully demonstrates why Patrick Henry's “give me liberty or give me death” has resonated so strongly in the American imagination.
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cover of Negative Liberty: Public Opinion and the Terrorist Attacks on America

Negative Liberty

Public Opinion and the Terrorist Attacks on America

Darren W. Davis

Russell Sage Foundation, 2007

Did America's democratic convictions "change forever" after the terrorist attacks of September 11? In the wake of 9/11, many pundits predicted that Americans' new and profound anxiety would usher in an era of political acquiescence. Fear, it was claimed, would drive the public to rally around the president and tolerate diminished civil liberties in exchange for security. Political scientist Darren Davis challenges this conventional wisdom in Negative Liberty, revealing a surprising story of how September 11 affected Americans' views on civil liberties and security. Drawing on a unique series of original public opinion surveys conducted in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 and over the subsequent three years, Negative Liberty documents the rapid shifts in Americans' opinions regarding the tradeoff between liberty and security, at a time when the threat of terrorism made the conflict between these values particularly stark. Theories on the psychology of threat predicted that people would cope with threats by focusing on survival and reaffirming their loyalty to their communities, and indeed, Davis found that Americans were initially supportive of government efforts to prevent terrorist attacks by rolling back certain civil liberties. Democrats and independents under a heightened sense of threat became more conservative after 9/11, and trust in government reached its highest level since the Kennedy administration. But while ideological divisions were initially muted, this silence did not represent capitulation on the part of civil libertarians. Subsequent surveys in the years after the attacks revealed that, while citizens' perceptions of threat remained acute, trust in the government declined dramatically in response to the perceived failures of the administration's foreign and domestic security policies. Indeed, those Americans who reported the greatest anxiety about terrorism were the most likely to lose confidence in the government in the years after 2001. As a result, ideological unity proved short lived, and support for civil liberties revived among the public. Negative Liberty demonstrates that, in the absence of faith in government, even extreme threats to national security are not enough to persuade Americans to concede their civil liberties permanently. The September 11 attacks created an unprecedented conflict between liberty and security, testing Americans' devotion to democratic norms. Through lucid analysis of concrete survey data, Negative Liberty sheds light on how citizens of a democracy balance these competing values in a time of crisis.
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cover of Negotiated Reform: The Multilevel Governance of Financial Regulation

Negotiated Reform

The Multilevel Governance of Financial Regulation

Edited by Renate Mayntz

Campus Verlag, 2016

Multilevel structures are becoming increasingly characteristic of the world in which we live. This book is a unique study of policy making in a multilevel political system extending from the national to the international level. Taking as its subject the process of financial market reforms that took place following the recent financial crisis, it brings together an international group of renowned social scientists to explore the interplay between international organizations, European authorities, and regulators in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany in global financial decision making. Contributors thoroughly explore a small set of reform issues—including bank structure, bank capital, resolution, and over-the-counter trading of derivatives—to provide a detailed view of the vertical and horizontal interactions between these actors as related to a set of key questions: Are those states affected by the crisis adopting internationally negotiated regulations? Or are they instead determining the European and international reform agenda? Are the agreed upon policies contributing to greater harmonization of financial regulation in a multilevel political system? Or is the process being dominated by differing national interests?
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cover of Negotiating Childhood: French Colonialism and African Children in Senegal, 1848–1940

Negotiating Childhood

French Colonialism and African Children in Senegal, 1848–1940

Kelly M. Duke Bryant

University of Massachusetts Press, 2026

A groundbreaking study of the meaning of childhood in French colonial Senegal

Negotiating Childhood explores how colonial child protection policies and African children’s responses to them produced new ways of defining, measuring, documenting, and experiencing childhood in the French colony of Senegal from 1848 to 1940. In this groundbreaking book, Kelly M. Duke Bryant takes the scholarship in new directions, offering to a literature dominated by studies of British colonies in the twentieth century a study of childhood in a French colony from the immediate post-emancipation period through the 1930s. This focus allows her to complicate the generally accepted timeline of child protection in colonial Africa and question other assumptions about children’s history on the continent.

This deeply researched work uses a wide range of sources to examine children’s experiences in spaces where they encountered French discipline and surveillance, such as wardship courts, public streets, schools, juvenile reformatories, and vaccine clinics. The book shows not only how these spaces re-ordered African childhood, but also how children themselves shaped and limited French efforts to impose order, especially when the state depended on African children’s cooperation to make good on rhetoric about child “protection.” It also charts the rise of documentation in children’s lives, as colonial representatives recorded names, ages, and other details about the African children with whom they interacted. Tracing the “documented” child back to the early colonial period, Negotiating Childhood historicizes the emergence of identity documentation—so crucial to our contemporary world—and questions the naturalness of the very idea of the “child.”

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cover of Negotiating Empire: The Cultural Politics of Schools in Puerto Rico, 1898–1952

Negotiating Empire

The Cultural Politics of Schools in Puerto Rico, 1898–1952

Solsiree del Moral

University of Wisconsin Press, 2013

After the United States invaded Puerto Rico in 1898, the new unincorporated territory sought to define its future. Seeking to shape the next generation and generate popular support for colonial rule, U.S. officials looked to education as a key venue for promoting the benefits of Americanization. At the same time, public schools became a site where Puerto Rican teachers, parents, and students could formulate and advance their own projects for building citizenship. In Negotiating Empire, Solsiree del Moral demonstrates how these colonial intermediaries aimed for regeneration and progress through education.
    Rather than seeing U.S. empire in Puerto Rico during this period as a contest between two sharply polarized groups, del Moral views their interaction as a process of negotiation. Although educators and families rejected some tenets of Americanization, such as English-language instruction, they also redefined and appropriated others to their benefit to increase literacy and skills required for better occupations and social mobility. Pushing their citizenship-building vision through the schools, Puerto Ricans negotiated a different school project—one that was reformist yet radical, modern yet traditional, colonial yet nationalist.
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cover of Negotiating Identity and Collective Memory in Czech Silesia

Negotiating Identity and Collective Memory in Czech Silesia

Johana Wyss

Central European University Press, 2026

This study offers an ethnographic exploration of how memory, identity, and history are contested in the city of Opava and the surrounding Hlu.ín area – former sites of Austrian and Prussian rule shaped by post-imperial legacies, displacement, and shifting national narratives. Drawing on extensive fieldwork, the book investigates how local communities navigate dominant Czech nationalism and vernacular Silesian identities through memorials, oral histories, cultural expression, and tourism. Chapters explore themes such as Wehrmacht legacies, linguistic politics, and the branding of Silesian cuisine, revealing how cultural memory is selectively preserved, silenced, or commodified. Through rich case studies, the book highlights the tensions between official discourses and grassroots memory practices, showing how identity in this Central European borderland is continually reconstructed. Blending theoretical depth with lived experience, this study offers new insight into the role of collective memory in shaping belonging in post-imperial, post-socialist Europe.
[more]
cover of Negotiating Tribal Water Rights: Fulfilling Promises in the Arid West

Negotiating Tribal Water Rights

Fulfilling Promises in the Arid West

Bonnie G. Colby, John E. Thorson, and Sarah Britton; Foreword by David H. Getches

University of Arizona Press, 2005

Water conflicts plague every river in the West, with the thorniest dilemmas found in the many basins with Indian reservations and reserved water rights—rights usually senior to all others in over-appropriated rivers. Negotiations and litigation over tribal water rights shape the future of both Indian and non-Indian communities throughout the region, and intense competition for limited water supplies has increased pressure to address tribal water claims.

Much has been written about Indian water rights; for the many tribal and non-Indian stakeholders who rely upon western water, this book now offers practical guidance on how to negotiate them. By providing a comprehensive synthesis of western water issues, tribal water disputes, and alternative approaches to dispute resolution, it offers a valuable sourcebook for all—tribal councils, legislators, water professionals, attorneys—who need a basic understanding of the complexities of the situation.

The book reviews the history, current status, and case law related to western water while revealing strategies for addressing water conflicts among tribes, cities, farms, environmentalists, and public agencies. Drawing insights from the process, structure, and implementation of water rights settlements currently under negotiation or already agreed to, it presents a detailed analysis of how these cases evolve over time. It also provides a wide range of contextual materials, from the nuts and bolts of a Freedom of Information Act request to the hydrology of irrigation. It also includes contributed essays by expert authors on special topics, as well as interviews with key individuals active in water management and tribal water cases.

As stakeholders continue to battle over rights to water, this book clearly addresses the place of Native rights in the conflict. Negotiating Tribal Water Rights offers an unsurpassed introduction to the ongoing challenges these claims present to western water management while demonstrating the innovative approaches that states, tribes, and the federal government have taken to fulfill them while mitigating harm to both non-Indians and the environment.

[more]
cover of Negotiating With ETA: Obstacles To Peace In The Basque Country, 1975-1988

Negotiating With ETA

Obstacles To Peace In The Basque Country, 1975-1988

Robert P. Clark

University of Nevada Press, 1990

Since the late 1960s, the Basque insurgent organization ETA (Euzkadi ta Askatasuna, or Basque Homeland and Freedom) has been engaged in a violent struggle against the Spanish state in an effort to gain the independence of the Basque Country. ETA violence has led to the death of hundreds of people, making the organization the most violent insurgent group in Europe. Between 1975 and 1988, nearly thirty attempts to negotiate an end to violence, with a few limited exceptions, all ended in failure. This important book examines why the efforts to negotiate have failed and makes suggestions on how to improve the chances for successful discussion in the future. Although Clark does not disprove the conventional wisdom that negotiation with terrorists is a bad idea, he does begin from the opposing point of view that there may be some positive values to be realized from such negotiation.Negotiating with ETA describes the various factions that are interested in the outcome of such negotiations and the Spanish antiterrorist policy throughout the period under examination. The book also recounts the early attempts to negotiate, the first attempt at "social reintegration," various attempts by the Basque Government to get negotiations started, negotiation efforts under the Spanish socialist government of Felipe González, and the lengthy negotiations that took place in Algeria. A wide range of scholars and specialists will find this book valuable, including those interested in contemporary Spanish politics, ethnic nationalism, Basque affairs, the problem of terrorism, and conflict resolution.

[more]
cover of Negotiating in Civil Conflict: Constitutional Construction and Imperfect Bargaining in Iraq

Negotiating in Civil Conflict

Constitutional Construction and Imperfect Bargaining in Iraq

Haider Ala Hamoudi

University of Chicago Press, 2013

In 2005, Iraq drafted its first constitution and held the country’s first democratic election in more than fifty years. Even under ideal conditions, drafting a constitution can be a prolonged process marked by contentious debate, and conditions in Iraq are far from ideal: Iraq has long been racked by ethnic and sectarian conflict, which intensified following the American invasion and continues today. This severe division, which often erupted into violence, would not seem to bode well for the fate of democracy. So how is it that Iraq was able to surmount its sectarianism to draft a constitution that speaks to the conflicting and largely incompatible ideological view of the Sunnis, Shi’ah, and Kurds?
 
Haider Ala Hamoudi served in 2009 as an adviser to Iraq’s Constitutional Review Committee, and he argues here that the terms of the Iraqi Constitution are sufficiently capacious to be interpreted in a variety of ways, allowing it to appeal to the country’s three main sects despite their deep disagreements. While some say that this ambiguity avoids the challenging compromises that ultimately must be made if the state is to survive, Hamoudi maintains that to force these compromises on issues of central importance to ethnic and sectarian identity would almost certainly result in the imposition of one group’s views on the others. Drawing on the original negotiating documents, he shows that this feature of the Constitution was not an act of evasion, as is sometimes thought, but a mark of its drafters’ awareness in recognizing the need to permit the groups the time necessary to develop their own methods of working with one another over time.

[more]
cover of Negotiation Analysis

Negotiation Analysis

H. Peyton Young, Editor

University of Michigan Press, 1991

Negotiation Analysis brings together leading experts to bridge theory and practice in the fast-evolving fields of negotiation, game theory, and decision science. Designed for students and practitioners without advanced mathematical training, this volume distills key results from economics, psychology, and game theory that illuminate the dynamics of negotiation.Through accessible essays, the book explores core topics such as fair division, arbitration procedures, strategic incentives, the influence of cognitive biases, coalition formation, and the dangers of escalation. Each chapter illustrates concepts with real-world examples and practical applications, providing readers with frameworks for understanding negotiation processes in business, law, politics, and beyond.Intended as both a supplement to Howard Raiffa’s classic The Art and Science of Negotiation and a standalone reference, Negotiation Analysis challenges assumptions and deepens insight into how people reach agreements—or fail to do so—across a wide variety of settings.
[more]
cover of Neighbors and Strangers: The Fundamentals of Foreign Affairs

Neighbors and Strangers

The Fundamentals of Foreign Affairs

William R. Polk

University of Chicago Press, 1997

How important are foreign affairs in the grand scheme of civilization? Do defenses against the invasion of strangers influence the evolution of culture? Drawing on decades of experience in government as well as in the academy, William R. Polk offers a uniquely informed, comprehensive view of foreign relations. Bridging academic disciplines he treats foreign affairs as they occur in the real world. Instead of separating diplomacy, intelligence and espionage, defense and warfare, trade and aid, intervention and law from one another, he shows how they interact and together form a whole pattern with which we must deal if we are to move safely into the 21st century. But Neighbors and Strangers is not just a guide to the future; Polk draws upon all recorded history, and indeed upon studies of animal and primitive social behavior, and from the entire world for vivid examples to illuminate for the general reader the underlying principles and consistencies that characterize relations with foreigners.

Indeed, going deeper into the human experience, Polk documents "fear of the foreigner" as a visceral response so deep-seated and so pervasive that it transcends human memory, individual experience and even logical analysis. More generally, he shows that the tension created by having to live as neighbors with those who, in the definition of contemporaries, were irredeemably alien has been one of the major causes of the rise of civilizations.

Accessible and engaging, Neighbors and Strangers is a revelatory look at how foreign affairs are a profound reflection of human nature.
[more]
cover of Neither Cargo nor Cult: Ritual Politics and the Colonial Imagination in Fiji

Neither Cargo nor Cult

Ritual Politics and the Colonial Imagination in Fiji

Martha Kaplan

Duke University Press, 1995

In the 1880s an oracle priest, Navosavakadua, mobilized Fijians of the hinterlands against the encroachment of both Fijian chiefs and British colonizers. British officials called the movement the Tuka cult, imagining it as a contagious superstition that had to be stopped. Navosavakadua and many of his followers, deemed "dangerous and disaffected natives," were exiled. Scholars have since made Tuka the standard example of the Pacific cargo cult, describing it as a millenarian movement in which dispossessed islanders sought Western goods by magical means. In this study of colonial and postcolonial Fiji, Martha Kaplan examines the effects of narratives made real and traces a complex history that began neither as a search for cargo, nor as a cult.
Engaging Fijian oral history and texts as well as colonial records, Kaplan resituates Tuka in the flow of indigenous Fijian history-making and rereads the archives for an ethnography of British colonizing power. Proposing neither unchanging indigenous culture nor the inevitable hegemony of colonial power, she describes the dialogic relationship between plural, contesting, and changing articulations of both Fijian and colonial culture.
A remarkable enthnographic account of power and meaning, Neither Cargo nor Cult addresses compelling questions within anthropological theory. It will attract a wide audience among those interested in colonial and postcolonial societies, ritual and religious movements, hegemony and resistance, and the Pacific Islands.
[more]
cover of Neither Liberal nor Conservative: Ideological Innocence in the American Public

Neither Liberal nor Conservative

Ideological Innocence in the American Public

Donald R. Kinder and Nathan P. Kalmoe

University of Chicago Press, 2017

Congress is crippled by ideological conflict. The political parties are more polarized today than at any time since the Civil War. Americans disagree, fiercely, about just about everything, from terrorism and national security, to taxes and government spending, to immigration and gay marriage.
Well, American elites disagree fiercely. But average Americans do not. This, at least, was the position staked out by Philip Converse in his famous essay on belief systems, which drew on surveys carried out during the Eisenhower Era to conclude that most Americans were innocent of ideology. In Neither Liberal nor Conservative, Donald Kinder and

Nathan Kalmoe argue that ideological innocence applies nearly as well to the current state of American public opinion. Real liberals and real conservatives are found in impressive numbers only among those who are deeply engaged in political life. The ideological battles between American political elites show up as scattered skirmishes in the general public, if they show up at all.

If ideology is out of reach for all but a few who are deeply and seriously engaged in political life, how do Americans decide whom to elect president; whether affirmative action is good or bad? Kinder and Kalmoe offer a persuasive group-centered answer. Political preferences arise less from ideological differences than from the attachments and antagonisms of group life. 
 
[more]
cover of Neither Separate Nor Equal: Congress in the 1790s

Neither Separate Nor Equal

Congress in the 1790s

Kenneth R. Bowling

Ohio University Press, 2000

Scholars today take for granted the existence of a “wall of separation” dividing the three branches of the federal government. Neither Separate nor Equal: Congress in the 1790s demonstrates that such lines of separation among the legislative, executive, and judicial branches, however, were neither so clearly delineated nor observed in the first decade of the federal government's history.

The first two essays describe the social and cultural milieu attending the movement of the republican court from New York to Philadelphia and the physical and social environment of Philadelphia in the 1790s. The following section examines the congressional career of New York's Egbert Benson, the senatorial career of Robert Morris as an expression of his economic interests, the vigorous opposition of Rep. William Branch Giles to the Federalist policies of the Washington administration, and finally the underappreciated role of congressional spouses.

The last five essays concentrate on areas of interbranch cooperation and conflict. In particular, they discuss the meaning of separation of powers in the 1790s, Washington as an active president with Congress, the contrast between Hamilton's and Jefferson's exercise of political influence with Congress, and John Adams's relationship with Congress during the Quasi-War crisis.

The essays in this collection, the second volume of the series Perspectives on the History of Congress, 1789-1801, originated in two conferences held in 1995 and 1996 by the United States Capitol Historical Society.

[more]
cover of Neoliberal Apartheid: Palestine/Israel and South Africa after 1994

Neoliberal Apartheid

Palestine/Israel and South Africa after 1994

Andy Clarno

University of Chicago Press, 2017

In recent years, as peace between Israelis and Palestinians has remained cruelly elusive, scholars and activists have increasingly turned to South African history and politics to make sense of the situation. In the early 1990s, both South Africa and Israel began negotiating with their colonized populations. South Africans saw results: the state was democratized and black South Africans gained formal legal equality. Palestinians, on the other hand, won neither freedom nor equality, and today Israel remains a settler-colonial state. Despite these different outcomes, the transitions of the last twenty years have produced surprisingly similar socioeconomic changes in both regions: growing inequality, racialized poverty, and advanced strategies for securing the powerful and policing the racialized poor. Neoliberal Apartheid explores this paradox through an analysis of (de)colonization and neoliberal racial capitalism.

After a decade of research in the Johannesburg and Jerusalem regions, Andy Clarno presents here a detailed ethnographic study of the precariousness of the poor in Alexandra township, the dynamics of colonization and enclosure in Bethlehem, the growth of fortress suburbs and private security in Johannesburg, and the regime of security coordination between the Israeli military and the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. The first comparative study of the changes in these two areas since the early 1990s, the book addresses the limitations of liberation in South Africa, highlights the impact of neoliberal restructuring in Palestine, and argues that a new form of neoliberal apartheid has emerged in both contexts.
[more]
cover of Neoliberal Chicago

Neoliberal Chicago

Edited by Larry Bennett, Roberta Garner, and Euan Hague

University of Illinois Press, 2017

The neoliberal philosophy of fiscal austerity aligned with reduced regulation has transformed Chicago. As pursued by mayor Rahm Emanuel and his predecessor Richard M. Daley, neoliberalism led officials to privatize everything from parking meters to schools, gut regulations and social services, and promote gentrification wherever possible. The essayists in Neoliberal Chicago explore an essential question: how does neoliberalism work on the ground in today's Chicago? Contextual chapters explore race relations, physical development, and why Chicago embraced neoliberalism. Other contributors delve into aspects of the neoliberal vision, neoliberalism's impact on three iconic city spaces, and how events like the 2008 foreclosure crisis and the bid to attract the Olympic Games reveal the workings of neoliberalism. Contributors: Stephen Alexander, Larry Bennett, Michael Bennett, Carrie Breitbach, Sean Dinces, Kenneth Fidel, Roberta Garner, Euan Hague, Black Hawk Hancock, Christopher Lamberti, Michael J. Lorr, Martha Martinez, Brendan McQuade, Alex G. Papadopoulos, Rajiv Shah, Costas Spirou, Carolina Sternberg, and Yue Zhang.
[more]
cover of Neoliberal Frontiers: An Ethnography of Sovereignty in West Africa

Neoliberal Frontiers

An Ethnography of Sovereignty in West Africa

Brenda Chalfin

University of Chicago Press, 2010

In Neoliberal Frontiers, Brenda Chalfin presents an ethnographic examination of the day-to-day practices of the officials of Ghana’s Customs Service, exploring the impact of neoliberal restructuring and integration into the global economy on Ghanaian sovereignty. From the revealing vantage point of the Customs office, Chalfin discovers a fascinating inversion of our assumptions about neoliberal transformation: bureaucrats and local functionaries, government offices, checkpoints, and registries are typically held to be the targets of reform, but Chalfin finds that these figures and sites of authority act as the engine for changes in state sovereignty. Ghana has served as a model of reform for the neoliberal establishment, making it an ideal site for Chalfin to explore why the restructuring of a state on the global periphery portends shifts that occur in all corners of the world. At once a foray into international political economy, politics, and political anthropology, Neoliberal Frontiers is an innovative interdisciplinary leap forward for ethnographic writing, as well as an eloquent addition to the literature on postcolonial Africa.
[more]
cover of Neoliberalism and Unlawful Governance: The Crisis of Democratic Rights

Neoliberalism and Unlawful Governance

The Crisis of Democratic Rights

Guillermina Seri

University of Michigan Press, 2026

Neoliberalism and Unlawful Governance explores how democratic governments continue to exclude and abuse people. It examines the authoritarian roots of neoliberal policies that portray markets as the solution to every single problem and how these policies have been prioritized above democracy, human rights, and even nature. By examining global trends, the book identifies neoliberalism as the current dominant expression of capitalism. Grounded in emergency, security, police mechanisms, and the politics of the spectacular, this framework helps explain the rationale behind the persistence of unlawful governance and its legitimizing strategies. 

In looking at the ways in which people resist, the book honors the perspective of the excluded and the voices of those most immediately affected by neoliberal austerity—from activists defending land and rights to communities subjected to various forms of exploitation, extractivism, and displacement. Bringing in these voices and theoretical perspectives, including from beyond the English-speaking world, this book highlights alternative ways of thinking about democracy and rights, drawing from the tradition of the commons. Through its deep analysis of history, theory, and world events, Neoliberalism and Unlawful Governance offers fresh insights into how various forms of emergency measures, policing, and security are used to privilege markets over people and the planet, while also emphasizing the crucial role of popular movements in defending and expanding democratic rights and to rebuilding commons.
[more]
cover of Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty

Neoliberalism as Exception

Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty

Aihwa Ong

Duke University Press, 2006

Neoliberalism is commonly viewed as an economic doctrine that seeks to limit the scope of government. Some consider it a form of predatory capitalism with adverse effects on the Global South. In this groundbreaking work, Aihwa Ong offers an alternative view of neoliberalism as an extraordinarily malleable technology of governing that is taken up in different ways by different regimes, be they authoritarian, democratic, or communist. Ong shows how East and Southeast Asian states are making exceptions to their usual practices of governing in order to position themselves to compete in the global economy. As she demonstrates, a variety of neoliberal strategies of governing are re-engineering political spaces and populations. Ong’s ethnographic case studies illuminate experiments and developments such as China’s creation of special market zones within its socialist economy; pro-capitalist Islam and women’s rights in Malaysia; Singapore’s repositioning as a hub of scientific expertise; and flexible labor and knowledge regimes that span the Pacific.

Ong traces how these and other neoliberal exceptions to business as usual are reconfiguring relationships between governing and the governed, power and knowledge, and sovereignty and territoriality. She argues that an interactive mode of citizenship is emerging, one that organizes people—and distributes rights and benefits to them—according to their marketable skills rather than according to their membership within nation-states. Those whose knowledge and skills are not assigned significant market value—such as migrant women working as domestic maids in many Asian cities—are denied citizenship. Nevertheless, Ong suggests that as the seam between sovereignty and citizenship is pried apart, a new space is emerging for NGOs to advocate for the human rights of those excluded by neoliberal measures of human worthiness.

[more]
cover of Neoliberalism from Below: Popular Pragmatics and Baroque Economies

Neoliberalism from Below

Popular Pragmatics and Baroque Economies

Verónica Gago

Duke University Press, 2017

In Neoliberalism from Below—first published in Argentina in 2014—Verónica Gago examines how Latin American neoliberalism is propelled not just from above by international finance, corporations, and government, but also by the activities of migrant workers, vendors, sweatshop workers, and other marginalized groups. Using the massive illegal market La Salada in Buenos Aires as a point of departure, Gago shows how alternative economic practices, such as the sale of counterfeit goods produced in illegal textile factories, resist neoliberalism while simultaneously succumbing to its models of exploitative labor and production. Gago demonstrates how La Salada's economic dynamics mirror those found throughout urban Latin America. In so doing, she provides a new theory of neoliberalism and a nuanced view of the tense mix of calculation and freedom, obedience and resistance, individualism and community, and legality and illegality that fuels the increasingly powerful popular economies of the global South's large cities.
[more]
cover of Neoliberalism in Vietnam, Volume 20

Neoliberalism in Vietnam, Volume 20

Ann M. Leshkowich and Christina Schwenkel

Duke University Press, 0

Like China, Vietnam has one of the world’s fastest growing economies on account of its hybridized "market socialism" that combines elements of its official socialist system with free market capitalism. This special issue examines Vietnam’s current social and economic improvisations as situated in specific local and historical experiences. These essays address the complexities and multiplicities of neoliberal reform agendas, demonstrating that socialist and neoliberal regimes are neither exclusive nor distinct.
Contributors draw their conclusions from ethnographic fieldwork in contemporary urban spaces. They link neoliberalism in Vietnam to a set of globally diverse technical practices, institutions, modes of power, and governing strategies; for example, in its shifting currency regimes and its anticorruption campaigns. Contributors also explore the growing emphasis on self-improvement and modernization through studies of architecture, changing beauty standards, and the impact of in vitro fertilization. Biopolitical logics and the self-regulation of moral personhood are also addressed in essays on HIV/AIDS and transnational adoption. The issue highlights the ways in which the socialist past is integral to the present in Vietnam, even as it is remade and newly configured.

Contributors: Erik Harms, Nina Hien, Ann Marie Leshkowich, Li Zhang, Ken MacLean, Alfred John Montoya, Melissa J. Pashigian, Christina Schwenkel, Allison Truitt

Guest editors: Christina Schwenkel (Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of California at Riverside) and Ann Marie Leshkowich (Associate Professor and Chair, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, College of the Holy Cross).

[more]
cover of Nestor Makhno and Rural Anarchism in Ukraine, 1917-1921

Nestor Makhno and Rural Anarchism in Ukraine, 1917-1921

Colin Darch

Pluto Press, 2020

Histories of the Russian Revolution often present the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917 as the central event, neglecting the diverse struggles of urban and rural revolutionaries across the heartlands of the Russian Empire. This book takes as its subject one such struggle, the anarcho-communist peasant revolt led by Nestor Makhno in left-bank Ukraine, locating it in the context of the final collapse of the Empire that began in 1914.

Between 1917 and 1921, the Makhnovists fought German and Austrian invaders, reactionary monarchist forces, Ukrainian nationalists and sometimes the Bolsheviks themselves. Drawing upon anarchist ideology, the Makhnovists gathered widespread support amongst the Ukrainian peasantry, taking up arms when under attack and playing a significant role - in temporary alliance with the Red Army - in the defeats of the White Generals Denikin and Wrangel. Often dismissed as a kulak revolt, or a manifestation of Ukrainian nationalism, Colin Darch analyses the successes and failures of the Makhnovist movement, emphasising its revolutionary character.

Over 100 years after the revolutions, this book reveals a lesser known side of 1917, contributing both to histories of the period and broadening the narrative of 1917, whilst enriching the lineage of anarchist history.
[more]
cover of Nestor Makhno and Rural Anarchism in Ukraine, 1917-1921

Nestor Makhno and Rural Anarchism in Ukraine, 1917-1921

Colin Darch

Pluto Press, 2020

Histories of the Russian Revolution often present the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917 as the central event, neglecting the diverse struggles of urban and rural revolutionaries across the heartlands of the Russian Empire. This book takes as its subject one such struggle, the anarcho-communist peasant revolt led by Nestor Makhno in left-bank Ukraine, locating it in the context of the final collapse of the Empire that began in 1914.

Between 1917 and 1921, the Makhnovists fought German and Austrian invaders, reactionary monarchist forces, Ukrainian nationalists and sometimes the Bolsheviks themselves. Drawing upon anarchist ideology, the Makhnovists gathered widespread support amongst the Ukrainian peasantry, taking up arms when under attack and playing a significant role - in temporary alliance with the Red Army - in the defeats of the White Generals Denikin and Wrangel. Often dismissed as a kulak revolt, or a manifestation of Ukrainian nationalism, Colin Darch analyzes the successes and failures of the Makhnovist movement, emphasizing its revolutionary character.

Over 100 years after the revolutions, this book reveals a lesser known side of 1917, contributing both to histories of the period and broadening the narrative of 1917, whilst enriching the lineage of anarchist history.
[more]
cover of Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age

Network Culture

Politics for the Information Age

Tiziana Terranova

Pluto Press, 2004

[more]
cover of Networked: Business and Politics in Decentralizing Indonesia, 1998-2004

Networked

Business and Politics in Decentralizing Indonesia, 1998-2004

Wahyu Prasetyawan

National University of Singapore Press, 2018

B. J. Habibie may have served the shortest term of any of Indonesia’s presidents, but his push for decentralization would affect the country for decades. Habibie came to power in 1998 and immediately set to work restructuring the government. He gave local districts more power, allowing them to elect their own leaders and create their own bylaws. After years of authoritarian rule, these reforms were meant to return power to the people. But that led to local governments engaging in bureaucratic and political conflict with the central government over control of valuable natural resources and the distribution of the revenue they generated. Decentralization became the most important political economic development in Indonesia of the past thirty years.
Networked Business and Politics in Decentralizing Indonesia evaluates three cases of deep-seated political conflict and intrigue including central government, local governments, and multinational companies. It looks at how the structure of the national political economy has changed as the result of local politicians becoming involved in disputes with the national government over control of natural resources. It also analyzes how these changes will affect the distribution of wealth in the country as well as Indonesia’s evolving democratic politics and modes of governance.
[more]
cover of Networking China: The Digital Transformation of the Chinese Economy

Networking China

The Digital Transformation of the Chinese Economy

Yu Hong

University of Illinois Press, 2017

In recent years, China 's leaders have taken decisive action to transform information, communications, and technology (ICT) into the nation's next pillar industry. In Networking China , Yu Hong offers an overdue examination of that burgeoning sector's political economy. Hong focuses on how the state, in conjunction with market forces and class interests, is constructing and realigning its digitalized sector. State planners intend to build a more competitive ICT sector by modernizing the network infrastructure, corporatizing media-and-entertainment institutions, and by using ICT as a crosscutting catalyst for innovation, industrial modernization, and export upgrades. The goal: to end China's industrial and technological dependence upon foreign corporations while transforming itself into a global ICT leader. The project, though bright with possibilities, unleashes implications rife with contradiction and surprise. Hong analyzes the central role of information, communications, and culture in Chinese-style capitalism. She also argues that the state and elites have failed to challenge entrenched interests or redistribute power and resources, as promised. Instead, they prioritize information, communications, and culture as technological fixes to make pragmatic tradeoffs between economic growth and social justice.
[more]
cover of Networking Futures: The Movements against Corporate Globalization

Networking Futures

The Movements against Corporate Globalization

Jeffrey S. Juris

Duke University Press, 2008

Since the first worldwide protests inspired by Peoples’ Global Action (PGA)—including the mobilization against the November 1999 World Trade Organization meetings in Seattle—anti–corporate globalization activists have staged direct action protests against multilateral institutions in cities such as Prague, Barcelona, Genoa, and Cancun. Barcelona is a critical node, as Catalan activists have played key roles in the more radical PGA network and the broader World Social Forum process. In 2001 and 2002, the anthropologist Jeffrey S. Juris participated in the Barcelona-based Movement for Global Resistance, one of the most influential anti–corporate globalization networks in Europe. Combining ethnographic research and activist political engagement, Juris took part in hundreds of meetings, gatherings, protests, and online discussions. Those experiences form the basis of Networking Futures, an innovative ethnography of transnational activist networking within the movements against corporate globalization.

In an account full of activist voices and on-the-ground detail, Juris provides a history of anti–corporate globalization movements, an examination of their connections to local dynamics in Barcelona, and an analysis of movement-related politics, organizational forms, and decision-making. Depicting spectacular direct action protests in Barcelona and other cities, he describes how far-flung activist networks are embodied and how networking politics are performed. He further explores how activists have used e-mail lists, Web pages, and free software to organize actions, share information, coordinate at a distance, and stage “electronic civil disobedience.” Based on a powerful cultural logic, anti–corporate globalization networks have become models of and for emerging forms of radical, directly democratic politics. Activists are not only responding to growing poverty, inequality, and environmental devastation; they are also building social laboratories for the production of alternative values, discourses, and practices.

[more]
cover of Networks of Champions: Leadership, Access, and Advocacy in the U.S. House of Representatives

Networks of Champions

Leadership, Access, and Advocacy in the U.S. House of Representatives

Christine A. DeGregorio

University of Michigan Press, 1999

Media accounts of Congress emphasize conflict and the failure of Congress to enact legislation. Rarely do we see accounts of the successful efforts of members of Congress and outside advocacy groups to pass legislation dealing with important and controversial issues.
In Networks of Champions Christine A. DeGregorio identifies who in the U.S. House of Representatives took the lead in shepherding six major bills, dealing with welfare reform, drug control, international trade, farm policy, nuclear weapons testing, and assistance to the Contras, through Congress and how these champions of legislation worked with outside advocacy groups. DeGregorio finds that the champions of this legislation were drawn from a diverse group that included individuals both within and outside the formal hierarchy of leadership. The champions, who were not necessarily the prominent holders of important positions, are characterized by having knowledge of the subject matter, experience in the House, a facility for bargaining and compromise, the right committee assignments, and a commitment to hard work.
DeGregorio traces how these groups become influential and how the groups affect the policy-making process. She finds a reciprocal process in which advocacy groups use champions to express their views while champions use the resources of advocacy groups to gain influence in the House.
Based on extensive interviews with key congressional staff members and the leaders of advocacy groups, DeGregorio provides critical new insights into the legislative process. This book will be of interest to those who study the legislative process and the role of interest groups in making American policy.
". . . a substantial contribution to our understanding of advocacy in Congress." --Barbara Sinclair, University of California, Los Angeles
Christine A. DeGregorio is Associate Professor, Department of Government, School of Public Affairs, American University.
[more]
cover of Neuropolitics: Thinking, Culture, Speed

Neuropolitics

Thinking, Culture, Speed

William E. Connolly

University of Minnesota Press, 2002

Why would a political theorist venture into the nexus between neuroscience and film? According to William Connolly—whose new book is itself an eloquent answer—the combination exposes the ubiquitous role that technique plays in thinking, ethics, and politics. By taking up recent research in neuroscience to explore the way brain activity is influenced by cultural conditions and stimuli such as film technique, Connolly is able to fashion a new perspective on our attempts to negotiate-and thrive-within a deeply pluralized society whose culture and economy continue to quicken. In Neuropolitics Connolly draws upon recent brain/body research to explore the creative potential of thinking, the layered character of culture, the cultivation of ethical sensibilities, and the critical role of technique in all three. He then shows how a series of films-including Vertigo, Five Easy Pieces, and Citizen Kane-enhances our appreciation of technique and contests the linear image of time now prevalent in cultural theory. Connolly deftly brings these themes together to support an ethos of deep pluralism within the democratic state and a politics of citizen activism across states. His book is an original and rigorous study that attends to the creative possibilities of thinking in identity, culture, and ethics.
[more]
cover of Nevada's Great Recession: Looking Back, Moving Forward

Nevada's Great Recession

Looking Back, Moving Forward

Elliott Parker

University of Nevada Press, 2017

Of all economic recessions experienced by the United States in the postwar period, the Great Recession that began in 2008 was the deepest, longest, and most destructive. Nevada was among the hardest hit states, its people reeling from the aftereffects, and the state government also experiencing a severe fiscal crisis. University of Nevada economics professor Elliott Parker and then-State Treasurer Kate Marshall make sense of what went wrong and why, with the hope the state will learn lessons to prevent past mistakes from being made again.
 
This is a different kind of economics book. Parker uses his expertise from doing research on the East Asian fiscal crisis to give profound insights into what happened and how to avoid future catastrophes. Marshall personalizes it by providing vignettes of what it was actually like to be in the trenches and fighting the inevitable political battles that came up, and counteracting some of the falsehoods that certain politicians were spreading about the recession.
 
Parker and Marshall’s book should be required reading for not only every single elected official in Nevada, but for any private citizen who cares about the public good.
[more]